


Heaven Forfend

by orphan_account



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-21
Updated: 2013-03-21
Packaged: 2017-11-26 08:41:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 10,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/648700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Spoilers through "Torn and Frayed". When Ellen Harvelle finds out the Winchesters may be in trouble (again), she and her crew aren't going to let a little thing like being dead stop them from helping any way that they can.  Angry angels, an indifferent gardener, and all their own memories and desires turned against them ... well, Ellen's not going to let any little thing such as that stop them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It’s three o’clock on a Saturday.  It’s always been three o’clock on a Saturday, it always will be so.  The lunch crowd has cleared out by now, and the dinner crowd hasn’t started to drift in yet, let alone the evening drinking crew.  Dusty afternoon sunlight filters in through the fingerprinted windows of the Roadhouse with only the occasional cloud to darken the bar.  Ellen is polishing a glass that won’t quite give up its water spots, singing along to the radio.  It’s a string of her favorite songs: Billy Joel, Lou Reed, a little Clapton.  Must be the station’s commercial-free hour.  Of course it is.  Ellen can’t remember the last time she heard an actual commercial. 

Jo’s taking advantage of the break between customers to do some reading in the booth with the best lighting.  Ellen can’t make out the words on the well-worn cover: _Don Quixote_ , maybe, she thinks.  Jo was a literature major, once upon a time, or she was planning to be.  Ellen remembers now: she never had a chance to declare before she left school.  She’ll have time now to read all the literature she wants to.  Enough time to read all the literature that’s ever existed.

Ellen turns her head at the clatter of pool balls.  Bobby steps back from the table and surveys his handiwork.  He’ll play against Jo or Ellen, if they’re up for it, but when they’re not he’s just as likely to settle in for a game against himself as sit down at the bar for a bottle of Pabst.  Ellen thinks about suggesting a game of darts – maybe just as soon as she finishes with this glass.  Bobby glances up from his game, and they share a knowing smile before he crouches down to survey the placement of the eight-ball from a better angle.  It’s as much heaven as Ellen could have asked for, or almost as much.  Her daughter, an old friend.  Her home.  They make it work, between the three of them.

Well … usually there are four.

The front door crashes open.  The knife with the initials WAH engraved on the blade rattles in its case beside the entrance as they all bring whatever they are holding to bear as a makeshift weapon: Ellen with her pint glass, Jo the heavy hardback book, Bobby his pool cue.  This is more instinct than anything else – what’s disturbed them, since they made their way here one by one? – and they lower their raised fists at the sight of Ash, panting in the doorway.

“Christ’s sake, Ash.”  Ellen puts the glass down, water spots forgotten, and folds her arms.  “How long you been running around Heaven?  We were starting to think you weren’t coming back.”

“You darkening Einstein’s doorstep again?  Or you find some cute honey with a Harvard math degree and an RV and decide to settle down in your own little slice of heaven this time?” Jo teases. But her smile fades when Ash folds over, puts his hands on his knees to brace himself while he catches his breath.

“What’s going on, kid?” Bobby asks, and Ash looks up.

“It’s Castiel,” he says.  “Something’s wrong with Castiel.”

“Honey, we know that.”  Ellen doesn’t unfold her arms, just leans forward onto the bar.  They’ve had their eye on the Winchesters for a while now – ever since they arrived up here and Ash ushered them into his personalized vision of paradise – and where the Winchesters go, Castiel is likely to follow. They’ve seen the angel struggle, and founder, and find his feet again.  No one’s quite sure what to make of his sudden reappearance in the world after being sucked away into Purgatory – the only one who’d had anything to say on the matter had been Bobby, with a quiet “Good to hear that idjit ain’t out of the world for good just yet.”  But his increasingly erratic behavior since then … no one can overlook the murder of the angel Samandriel, though no one knows quite what to say about it, either.  And no one wants to be the first to say, “not again”.

Ash looks around at the guarded, weary faces.  Then he’s moving again, taking the knife down from its place of honor.  Ellen’s shout of disapproval is cut off as Ash slashes a line across his forearm, and then curses – they don’t bleed here, no one suffers illness or injury of any sort.  Jo rolls her eyes, but Ash is bouncing up and down impatiently in place while he mutters a few staccato syllables: must be Enochian, Ellen guesses.  When he’s done he makes another sharp gesture with the knife and this time an angry red line opens up in its wake.  He darts across the bar, slapping arcs and angles onto windows and walls.  “Hope to hell you’re planning on cleanup duty when you’re done finger-painting,” Ellen calls after him, but her heart is beating a nervous tempo in her throat right now, and it doesn’t slow when Ash finishes his work and joins her at the bar.  Jo and Bobby drift over to adjacent barstools to bookend him, too.

“What’s going on, Ash?” Jo asks.  She moves to lay a hand on his arm, and hesitates before settling just below his elbow, above the still-bleeding gash.  “We know Castiel’s off the rails.”  She sighs.  “Again.”

“Second verse, same as the first,” Bobby agrees.  His face doesn’t move much, but his voice is heavy.  “Who knows what t’hell happened to him in Purgatory?  That boy’s never been any more stable than a two-legged stool as it is.”

Ash draws a ragged breath and without even thinking about it Ellen reaches into the fridge under the bar and hands him a cold Pabst.  He cracks it open and rolls the first sip around his mouth before setting free a window-rattling belch.  “Purgatory’s a bitch, sure,” he says.  “That’ll mess a man up.  But y’all are missing the important question about all that.”

There’s a silence while Ash drains the rest of the can.  “How did he get out?” Jo murmurs, as he crushes the empty can down on the bar.

“Winner winner chicken dinner,” Ash proclaims, raising Jo’s hand like a prizefighting champion’s.  “Angel Soft sure didn’t fly himself out of there, did he?”

Ellen’s eyes flick to the red streaks painting her bar’s walls.  “And I’m just guessing whoever it was did fly him out of there has something to do with the new decorating scheme?”

“Place could do with a little soundproofing,” Ash agrees.  “I don’t want her to hear us.  Or _find_ us.”

“Her?” Bobby presses.  “Her _who_?”

“Naomi,” says Ash.

His mouth stretches to enunciate each letter, and still the name slides past Ellen like an eel in jelly. Jo gets up and stretches, yawns and tosses her hair over her shoulder.  Bobby finds a cube of blue cue chalk in his flannel pocket, and inspects it with mild surprise. In spite of herself, Ellen, too, turns back to the bar and starts polishing that same old glass again, that same damn water spot.  “What was that you were saying, honey?” she says.  “You gonna have another drink?”

“Naomi!” Ashs shouts, and slams his fist on the bar.  Ellen jumps as droplets of blood – his blood – spatter her almost-clean glass, the bar, her shirt.  “Naomi, Naomi, Naomi!”

“Naomi,” Ellen echoes.  Jo mouths the word silently, as if trying to capture it.  Bobby shakes his head, mutters it.  “Naomi?”

“Head bitch in charge,” says Ash.  “Bad news.  And yes, I think I would very much like another drink.”


	2. Chapter 2

They settle in at a table, Ellen and Jo and Bobby and Ash, with a pitcher of PBR and four clean glasses – no water spots and no blood either. “How long’s it going to be before we’re knife-proof again?” Bobby asks, eying Ash’s oozing forearm as Jo patches it up as best she can with the bar’s first-aid kit.

“It’s just me who’s in the flesh – you’re all still safe. As much as ever.” Ash flinches as Jo dips the needle for one last stitch. “And, well … I ain’t sure. Could be ten minutes, could be a week.”

“Terrific,” Bobby drawls, and pours himself the first pint. “So, all right. Who’s this Naomi you’re so worked up about, and what exactly has she got to do with our friend the Peter Falk wannabe?”

“She’s in charge of what’s left of the angels,” Ash says, and no one has to ask, left over from what? It’s that Peter Falk wannabe, of course, who came so close to obliterating Heaven’s ranks. “Something of a power vacuum left behind after, ah, after Castiel decided to take playing God a little too seriously. And y’know what they say about natures and vacuums and abhorring.”

“So there’s someone new sitting on the Throne of Thrones,” says Ellen. She accepts the pint Jo passes her, and resists the urge to slouch back in her chair. If this is fate that’s come knocking on her front door, she’s at least going to face it with decent posture. “Seems to me they come and go pretty regular. After the big guy abdicated, there was Zachariah and his lot, then Raphael. And then Cas, of course.” She smirks into her beer. “Maybe it’s about time they let a woman take a shot. Or, I guess, someone wearing a woman-shaped vessel, at least.”

“What’s her endgame?” asks Bobby. “The batteries on the Apocalypse are pretty well drained – she planning on trying to jump-start it again? There’s not a lot of angels left out there, I’m not sure all-out war with the guys downstairs is a great plan.”

“But that demon tablet,” says Jo. “The one Dean and Sam’s prophet had – maybe she’s hoping to kick the demons out of the world once and for all and lock the door behind them. Win the Apocalypse by forfeit, basically.”

“No celestial warriors stomping across the face of the planet … just a no-show victory. Everyone starts beating their swords into ploughshares – uh-uh.” Bobby wipes foam from his beard. “Sounds too good to be true, so it probably is.”

“I don’t know exactly what it is she’s meaning to do,” Ash admits. “Apocalypse, or something else. But it doesn’t matter, does it?”

“It doesn’t matter?” Ellen asks. She sets her glass down on the table a little harder than she intends to, and everyone looks at her. “All of us sitting here trying to make sure that things played out okay for the rest of the world, and I for one don’t plan on going off half-cocked until I know what I’m shooting at. I’m not interrupting a chance at peace on earth just because no one asked me my opinion about it in the first place.”

“She’s controlling Castiel,” Ash says, and all the attention in the room is back on him. “That’s a mighty powerful puppet she’s got, and one that’s awful close to the Winchesters. How good you feel about that, Ellen?”

Most of them don’t know Castiel well, except Bobby, who’s always said that it’s not exactly possible to know someone like Cas well, not really. One thing they’ve always been sure of, though, is that the Winchesters have never been in any danger from the angel. From his pissed-off ex-coworkers, sure, that’s fair enough; and demon trouble never seems to be far behind either. But that measure of trust doesn’t go for those at the helm of Heaven. For them to be guiding the hand of the man sitting quietly in the backseat of the Impala, waiting in the dark outside the hotel room where the Winchesters sleep … it doesn’t leave an easy feeling resting in the pit of Ellen’s stomach, no.

“How do you know?” Bobby asks. His fingers are curled tightly around his pint glass. When Ellen looks his way she can see the white edges of his knuckles. “How do you know this Naomi has got her claws in Cas?”

Ash explains the distress call he picked up on Angel FM, from poor lost Samandriel. Ellen doesn’t have a lot of sympathy for angels, but all that she knows of the boy is that he’d been captured trying to protect the prophet, tortured to the point of madness, and then murdered by an ally – angel or not, it’s hard not to feel a twinge of sympathy. But Samandriel had cried out to Naomi, Ash says now. And Naomi had answered.

“She told him to be patient, to wait for help. And not to say a word to the demon – she told him to take his own life if he had too. Or carve out his own Grace.” Ash scratches his armpit thoughtfully and shakes his head.

“But he talked,” Ellen says, and feels her throat constrict. “He must’ve spilled something she didn’t want spilled to those demons.”

Ash nods. He takes his hand off his beer, leaving the empty imprint of his palm in the frost on the glass. “The next thing I picked up was Naomi sending out orders for Castiel, of the reporting for duty variety.”

“And we all know what happened next,” Jo says. “Angel shish kebab, à la Castiel.”  
Her tone of voice makes Ellen turn and look at her. She’s grown used to her daughter’s face in heaven as it was when Jo was a young girl: open, laughing, happy. The thunderclap expression she’s wearing now cuts Ellen to the core. She’s always wondered – suspected – that there were feelings for Dean Winchester lurking somewhere under there. Even that’s not quite enough to smother the stab of righteous maternal anger she feels when the Winchester boys are threatened. Again. She reaches out and squeezes Jo’s hand, but Jo doesn’t squeeze back.

“So you got all that from tuning in to Angel Radio.” Bobby points across the table at Ash. “Why you been running around all over God’s green ea—Heaven?”

“Reconnoitering. Trying to figure out Naomi’s plans – not a lot of headway thereabouts. Trying to figure out our next steps …” Ash wags his finger back at Bobby’s perpetual scowl. “Now, there? I think I’ve got something, maybe.”

“Well?” Jo prompts, as Ash drains the rest of his beer. “Come on, Ash, you can’t just leave it at that.”

Ash sets the empty glass down on the table and drags his arm across his face. “Castiel’s in Heaven,” he says, and his grin is crooked and manic in equal parts. “For the time being, at least.”

“You want us to …” Ellen trails off. She looks around the bar, at the rows of unused glasses and the tarnished taps, Jo’s discarded book and the knife, cleaned, back in its place by the door. Maybe the last such look for a while. Maybe forever. “Huh.”

“Well,” says Bobby, and raises his glass. “Guess it’s time to call in the cavalry. Again.”

“Saddle up,” says Ellen, and her glass and Jo’s clink against his. “Well, we been up against worse than angels, haven’t we?”

“Angels ain’t so bad at all,” Ash says. He reaches into the side pocket of his jeans and pulls free a loosely-wrapped, narrow bundle that he tosses onto the table. It clatters once or twice before rolling to a stop. “If you know how to talk to ‘em.”

Jo reaches out and tugs at the piece of rough canvas. It gives way, and out tumbles a dagger, long and sleek and by all appearances very dangerous. “Ash,” breathes Bobby, “now how did you how have the good fortune to find yourself an angel sword?”

“Make my own fortune,” Ash says, and shoots a sidelong glance at Ellen. Just a quick glance, but Ellen is a mother and she’s fluent in the language of furtive looks and things left unsaid.

“Ash,” she says, as Jo examines the blade more closely. “Did you just bring down a world of trouble on our home?”

“Does it matter, Mom?” Jo looks up at her, the blade still held close to her face. “So what if trouble comes here? Isn’t trouble exactly what we’re about to go looking for?”

Ellen holds her gaze for a long moment, then exhales. There’s a lot that she lets go in that one long breath, and maybe no one but Bobby really senses that – he puts out a hand briefly, as if to lay it on her shoulder; then thinks better of it and fiddles with his beer instead. “Right,” she says. “Right. Well, let’s pack it up, then. It may be that Heaven can wait, but if history’s any guide, the Winchesters probably can’t.”


	3. Chapter 3

Ellen can’t remember the last time she stepped outside the Roadhouse’s front door.  Has she ventured outside since Ash found her in her own far-off heaven and led her here?  If she has, the memory slips away from her now.  The hazy afternoon sunlight that had been filtering into the bar is gone now – it’s a purple twilight as she and Jo and Bobby follow Ash toward the road that shrinks to a point over either horizon.  It’s a warm spring evening with just the hint of a dry breeze.  Good walking weather, Ellen thinks.  “Which way we heading, Ash?”

“The Garden,” Ash says.  He’s frowning at the sky overhead: the stars peeking out overhead aren’t any earthly constellations that Ellen can put a name to.  “God’s original little Skinner box, ‘cept with less levers and more apples.”

“It never says the word ‘apple’ in the Bible,” Jo says.  She’s looking back at the Roadhouse over one shoulder.  “Just says ‘the fruit’.  Some people think it might have been a quince.  Or a pomegranate.”

“I don’t put much stock in the whole Adam and Eve story, but the Garden is real enough.”  Bobby’s hands keep going in and out of his pockets – grasping, Ellen suspects, for the gun he no longer carries.  “Dean and Sam have been there.  Told me about it some.  Not much.”  He shoves his hands in his pockets and leaves them there this time.  “’Cept that it was something of a disappointment.”

“Gardens have gardeners,” Jo says.  “What are we walking into?  Do we even know what we’re going to find there, Ash?”

Ash raises his hands in front of himself.  “The gardener’s who we want to talk to.  Joshua.  Sam and Dean would have met him, I wager – he’s the only one who still talks to the Big Guy.  Y’know.  _God_.”

“Do you think he’ll have any answers for us?” pushes Jo.  “Josha, or God?  And would they tell us?  Are they going to believe us when we say something’s rotten in the state of Denmark?”

Ash just shrugs.  “You got a better idea, I’m open to hearing it.”

“Which way are we _heading_ , Ash?” Ellen repeats, and Ash points away down the road.

He warns them as they walk, about the things Heaven will throw at them on their travels: happy memories, soft ones, to trap them and pull them down into idleness.  Into bliss.  It’s not malicious, he says, or he doesn’t think so.  God wanted them to be happy, when he built this place from the ground up, so long ago.  He might not have been very good at it, maybe, or he doesn’t know the disarray the place has fallen into – he doesn’t know who’s at the reins these days.  Or he doesn’t care.  Ash explains it all, and is steered clear of too many references to string theory and pocket dimensions by irritated grumbling from Bobby whenever the conversation veers too far toward the metaphysical; he explains it all and he explains it – for Ash – very well.

And even so Ellen is startled when she looks up and finds herself staring across a field under bright midday sun, at the woman and the little girl racing through the tall grass.  A purple and blue kite darts up, finally, from the woman’s hands and the girl squawks with delight as it sails up into the clear blue sky.  She stares at the two of them, a little hungrily, and her heart jumps into her throat at the rattle of an old truck’s engine as it putters to a stop on the roadside. 

“Daddy!”  The little girl’s voice peals like a bell, and she takes off across the field with the forgotten kite left to pinwheel to the ground.  The woman sighs, and smiles, and retrieves the toy as she follows her daughter toward the sound of a slamming car door.

The man who gets out of the truck has no face.

“Oh,” Ellen gasps, and Jo is suddenly there beside her, holding her hand.  “I thought this one was mine …”

“You put away all the pictures of him.  I can remember what he looks like, if I really … but it kind of squeezes everything else out.  And then it’s just him and me, and … I like to remember it with you here too.”  She smiles as the faceless man takes the kite from his wife and drops it on the ground to sweep her up in a melodramatic kiss.  “And the kite for that matter.  My fifth birthday.”

“Fourth,” Ellen corrects, a little automatically.  “You got your first bike without training wheels when you were five.  And on your sixth …”  Bill hadn’t been there for Jo’s sixth birthday.  She trails off without finishing the thought.

Jo just tugs her by the hand.  “Come on.  The boys are getting ahead of us.”

“Can’t be having with that,” Ellen says, but her tone is hollow, and she’s looking over her shoulder as the field stretches ever wider between her and the family beside that battered old truck.

#

They stumble across the field more than once – sometimes from Jo’s perspective, and sometimes from Ellen’s.  Bobby’s memories are equally predictable, composed almost entirely of the time he spent with his pretty young wife, or the Winchester boys.  They pause for a moment in Bobby’s old house, on Sammy’s fourth birthday, where Bobby stops to take the baseball cap off his head and give it to the sniffling little boy.  “There you go,” he says.  “Just like Uncle Bobby’s.” 

It settles down well over little Sammy’s eyes, and he stops squalling long enough to wrap his little arms around Bobby’s leg.  “Fank you, Uncle Bobby,” he says between sniffles, and Bobby smiles.

“Believe me when I say you’ll grow into it.  And then some.”

“Look what I made!” shouts Dean, and runs out of the kitchen with a plate of lopsided and slightly scorched cookies that only an eight-year-old and his uncle could be particularly proud of.  He holds them up proudly and Bobby puts a hand on his head.

“You didn’t have to do that, Dean.”

“Yes, I did.”  Dean’s expression hardens for a moment before he catches sight of his little brother in his new hat.  “Ha!  Sammy, you look like you’re _shrinking_!”

“If we ever stumble upon whatever corner of Heaven John Winchester’s got himself stashed away in,” Ellen says, as Bobby disentangles himself and retreats, slowly, toward the door of the house and the road that they must follow, “remind me to tell him he’s a real son of a—”

“We all did the best we could.”  Bobby cuts her off, and brushes past her on the way out. But he can’t quite look her in the eye as he says it.

#

All of Ash’s happy memories seem to be situated at the Roadhouse: swapping stories with hunters, drinking with Ellen, explaining the practical applications of thermodynamics to Jo (or, really, anyone who would listen).  When Jo brings it up, he metaphysics up an explanation involving something about a positive feedback loop with the patterns he used to stabilize the version of the Roadhouse where they’d all united so that he could venture forth to others’ heavens without losing his own.  This discussion quickly takes a turn too far into hard science and the others all fall back a bit while he carries on about inflection points and singularities.  “How much farther do you think it is till we get to the Garden?” Jo whispers, for Ellen’s ears only.

“Not sure.  But at least … I’m worried about those two overgrown boys left to their own devices on Earth, don’t get me wrong.  The longer we take, the more likely it is that Castiel catches the next flight back to Earth, and who knows what kind of trouble the Winchester boys are bound to wind up in then?”  She shrugs.  “But I was worried this trip of ours was somehow going to be …”

“Worse?”

“Yeah,” Ellen says, and lets go of Jo’s hand just as another step along the endless road carries her inside the walls of a sweet little house that she hasn’t seen for more than a decade.  She looks around – pale yellow walls, a perfectly made-up crib.  She’s alone in Jo’s room, or the room that’s going to be Jo’s very soon.

“Where are we?” Bobby calls, from down the hall somewhere.  “It ain’t one of mine, that’s all I can tell for sure.”

“It’s mine,” Ellen shouts back, and Bill says from the nursery door, “Of course it’s yours, honey, you think I’m going to bring the wrong kid home from the hospital?”

She turns to look at him – this is the closest she’s been, in any memory yet.  He’s young, he’s so stupidly young she can barely stand it.  But he just grins at her, and bounces the baby in his arms, and says.  “All right, all right.  You wanna hold her again, I bet.  You’re hogging her, y’know that?”

“No,” Ellen says.  It’s hard to get the words out, her throat is so tight.  “You – you hold her, Bill.  I’ve had plenty of chances.  You hold her for a while.”

“Well, when you offer so nice,” Bill says, and the baby disappears like so much smoke as the adult Jo walks through the door.  He seizes her with one arm twisted up behind her back and his free hand on her throat, so tightly that she immediately gasps for breath.

“Daddy,” croaks Jo, and Ellen’s throat isn’t tight any more but everything else in her is, every muscle and sinew nearly creaks as she says, “You’re not my husband.”

“Quite right,” says the shape wearing Bill’s handsome, grinning face, the shape whose fingernails are digging into Jo’s face hard enough to break the skin.  “I am the angel Jehael, and you do _not_ belong here.”


	4. Chapter 4

Ellen’s first instinct is to look around the nursery for something that she can turn into a weapon – something sharp, something heavy.  But the room is all soft corners and soft fabric; she grabs the little green lamp from the nightstand and brandishes it like a sword.  “How did you know we were here?” she demands.  “Do you work for Naomi?” 

“We all work for Naomi.”  Jehael’s hand – Bill’s hand, he’s wearing the wedding band Ellen gave him all those years ago – tightens and Jo makes a guttural bid for air.  “I was passing through and sensed something amiss.  Little lambs gone astray.  How was it that you jumped your pasture fences, anyhow?  This little flock of yours in search of a shepherd?” 

“Let her go.”  Jo’s feet are moving more slowly now.  Ellen knows her daughter can’t die, not here, but she can’t bear the agonized look on Jo’s face.  She feints once with the lamp, but the angel only moves Jo’s body between them.  “Let her go, Bill!”

“You’d raise your hand to me?”  Jehael raises Bill’s eyebrows.  His grip on Jo slackens, just enough to permit Jo to gasp down one desperate breath.  “Would you tolerate such disrespect from your own daughter?  Why do you think I’d permit it in my children?”

“Heard something about an angel who thought he was God.”  Jo’s voice is harsh, almost raw.  She struggles against Jehael briefly, but he restrains her.  “How’d that work out for him, do you remember?”

“Ah,” says Jehael, and Ellen’s eyes catch Jo’s for just a moment.  Jo looks horrified, but Ellen shakes her head.  It’s fine.  It’s fine, baby.  “So that’s your game.  My brother Castiel serves Heaven’s will now, not Man’s.  And certainly not yours, Ellen Harvelle.”  He loosens his grip a little more on Jo.  “Naomi wouldn’t wish me to punish the righteous – even those so grievously misguided.  Turn around now and go back to your rightful place, and you won’t suffer further.”

“You gonna stop us?  You – and what army?”  Ellen tightens her grip on the lamp.  “From what I hear, you don’t have one of those at your back anymore.”

“I wonder,” Jehael says thoughtfully.  He turns his face toward Jo, whose head is still pushed up against his shoulder.  “Which would be worse?  To lose her now?  Or to be sent back to your personal heaven never having had a daughter at all – only the sad, constant feeling that you’re missing something so very, very important?”

Jo screams in anger and reaches up over her head with her free hand.  Her fingernails rake down Jehael’s face and he roars in pain … but his grips loosens for a moment, enough for Jo to pull away from him, and she shrieks at the fistful of hair she leaves behind in his fist.  Ellen shoves her daughter behind her and smashes the bloodied angel across the face with the lamp.

It shatters in her hands and she cries out in spite of herself as ceramic shards bite into her.  But Jehael only looks up at her from Bill’s eyes, and the cuts on his face are already healing.  “That,” he says, and his voice is not Bill’s anymore, his voice is as deep as the ocean and the sound of it makes Ellen drop to her knees. “That was a mistake.”

He reaches one hand toward her and for a dizzying moment she sees the angel behind the mask of her husband’s face.   There is something not human there, something terrible and old and beyond comprehension that stretches out from here into infinity, and she feels the cold dank air on her face that is stirred by invisible wings.  “You can’t hurt us,” she shouts, as she loses her grip on _here_ , on _now_ , and she flings the words out at him, or she thinks she does, “you can’t kill us, not here, this is Heaven, you can’t kill us.”

“I won’t kill you,” Jehael says, and smiles through the thin veneer of Bill’s face.  “I will _unmake you_.”

Bright light spills forth from his eyes and his mouth and she closes her eyes because the glory is too much for her to take.  She waits, shaking, across the time and space it takes to draw a breath, for the angel to pare her into atoms.

She opens her eyes when she fails to cease to exist.

Jo crawls across the floor to her, and pulls her mother onto her lap.  “S’okay,” she says hoarsely.  Ellen stares around the nursery blindly, cut to the core by this reversal of roles.  Here, of all places.  “S’okay, Mom.  It’s okay.”

“What happened?”  Ellen’s voice is sharper than she intended, and more ragged too.  She looks up at the doorway, where Ash is standing over the fallen angel.  The angel dagger is in his hand, dripping with what must be blood.  He’s staring down at the body, not answering her question.  “Where were you?” she demands, and he looks up at her.

“We’re getting close.  Must’ve tripped the security system.”  Ash offers a hand to Jo and Ellen as they stagger to their feet, but withdraws it after a moment when neither reaches to accept it.

Ellen’s not as sturdy on her feet as she would like, but she takes a moment to straighten Jo’s jacket and brush a stray hair out of her daughter’s face.  “How close?” she asks.

Ash only grins, and beckons her to follow him out of the bedroom, down the stairs, and into the kitchen.  “Very close,” he says, and turns the handle of the door into the back yard.

Ellen used to garden, once upon a time.  She planted roses in the backyard of that house, and herbs in the flowerboxes, and a little patch of vegetables in the only sunny corner.

This is not her backyard.

Bobby is already here, talking to a black man of about his own age who was dressed all in a rumpled groundskeeper’s uniform.  He’s holding a rake loosely at his side, and the knees of his pants were stained with dirt.  They both turn and look as Ellen, Jo, and Ash emerge from the house that is no longer there.  “Welcome to the Garden,” says the gardener.  “From what your friend has told me, you’ve been traveling for some time.”

His eyes are kind, and his smile is knowing.  Jo takes a halting step toward him.  “Are you – does that mean you’ll help us?”

“Oh, child,” Joshua says.  He moves his rake to put his weight on it, and looks out over all of their faces.  His knowing smile doesn’t change, not one flicker.  “Now that is a thing I cannot do.”


	5. Chapter 5

“You’re saying _no_ to us?” Bobby growls.  He advances toward the gardener with a menacing look on his face.  Mild-mannered old gardened though he may appear to be, though, this is still an angel they’re dealing with, and Ellen has seen enough angry angels for one day.  She takes two quick steps forward and catches Bobby by the sleeve.  He glares at her, but he also stops walking.  “Do you know what the stakes are?  Not to mention just how far we’ve come?” 

But Joshua only shrugs.  “World would be a different place if just trying made it so.”

“You know Naomi’s up to no good,” says Jo.  “For Earth, or Heaven either.  Are you going to just let her do whatever she wants?  Is God?  Or are you going to help us?”

“Am I going to help you?” Joshua muses.  He turns the rake and scrapes the grass with it, turning up dead leaves and broken twigs.  “Is God?  These aren’t the right questions you’re asking.  You might ask instead, ‘how much has God done for me already?’”

“I don’t need the Sunday school speech,” Jo cuts in.  There’s thunder under those words, and Ellen shoots her daughter a look.  She’s already hanging onto Bobby by one arm, she doesn’t need to babysit Jo, too.  “We need to get to Naomi’s headquarters, and we need your help to do it.  Or God’s.  Please, just – just tell us where to go!”

“You ever thought about what good luck it was for Ash to find an angel sword?  Or to be able to tune in to, well, the music of the spheres – and be able to understand it?  Or for you even to be able to find each other here?  That’s a privilege generally reserved for soulmates.”  Joshua reaches out with his rake for wider and wider sweeps.  “Small things at the time, but with a hand behind it, guiding you, in ways that might’ve seemed just meaningless at the time—”

“Terrific,” says Ellen, in spite of herself, but she can’t help it: all she can see during the angel’s sanctimonious speech are visions of Bill’s face – Bill’s real face – layered over the angel Jehael’s leer.  “And the one time it would’ve had some meaning, you give us nothing.”

Bobby immediately misunderstands her – purposefully or not, it’s probably for the best.  “Wasn’t a whole lot of fun defusing the apocalypse on our own when a little well-placed smiting would’ve done the trick.  I got my neck broken for my troubles, and that was getting off easy; Ellen and Jo got ripped apart by hell-hounds!”

“I know,” says Joshua, but his eyes are on Ellen.  “I’m sorry that you’ve suffered.  But God helps those who help themselves.”

“Well,” says Bobby, and spits on the ground, “I’ll be sure to keep that in mind next time I’m looking for something to cross-stitch.”

Joshua starts to say something else, some easy deflection of their purposes, no doubt; but Ash says something in Enochian, something that ends like _sal vok tay_ to Ellen’s ears, and whatever it means, it makes the angel’s head turn.  “What did you say?” he asks hoarsely.

Ash is idly picking at the dead leaves on a rhododendron.  “Picked that up on the holy wavelength along with a few other tidbits Naomi let drop without maybe realizing she’d done it … I think you and I both know what she’s up to.  She’s digging deep, Joshua.”

“It can’t be done,” Joshua says, but the rake is hanging idly from his hand now.  “We were made to obey God.  To rebel is one thing, but to put another – to _attempt_ to put another in the same place in our hearts … That’s blasphemy.”

Jo takes a step forward.  “So you _will_ help us?”

“No, Jo.  I’ve already told you, I can’t do that.”  Joshua takes up his rake in both hands, looks around the garden.  Even after all this, he’s still got that same kindly smile on his face.  Ellen suddenly wants very much to slap it off of him.  “Someone has to stay and look after the place.  And to be here to talk to Him, if he decides he wants to talk.  That’s my duty above all the rest.  And I’m the only one who can do it.”

“So you stay here,” Ellen says.  She lets go of Bobby now to step up beside Jo and lay a reassuring hand on her daughter’s shoulder.  “God may help those who help themselves, but someone’s got to help that boy Castiel too.”

“You can say that again,” Bobby mutters.  “’Cept when he’s gone evil, that idiot’s as helpless as a cat in a clothes dryer.”

“Help is not my forte,” says Joshua, and forestalls their inevitable arguments by continuing, “But talking is.  Let me tell you that while few souls ever make their way to my garden, there’s a part of Heaven visited by fewer still.  And as for the number that return from there …”  He shrugs.  “Those that have approached it and turned back say that they see things – their own memories and desires turned against them.”

“Already seen that,” says Ash, and Joshua silences him with a look.

“No.  You haven’t.”  He returns to his raking at the same slow, even pace as before.  “Some are driven mad by what they find, and those are the lucky ones.  Some souls are extinguished like guttering lamplights and never find their way home.”

“Yeah, sounds like a real picnic.”  Jo folds her arms.  “What you’re saying is, we can get there from here?”

“You’re already deep in Heaven – it’s not far, not far at all.  Once you cross the threshold, though, there’s no help but what you take with you, and no turning back either.”  Joshua turns his back on them, still raking the perfect green lawn.  “Of course, just as helping isn’t in my kit, neither is hindering.  You want to step through, that’s your business.”

“What threshold?” Bobby starts to ask, but there’s a garden shed there beside them, and perhaps it’s been there all along or perhaps it’s only just made itself known.  It has an unpainted door hung on rusty hinges – a door that’s ever so slightly ajar.  They stare at it, the four of them, for a long moment before Ellen breaks the silence.

“That stuff you said about Naomi just now,” she says to Ash.  “How long you been sitting on that?”

Ash meets her eyes, if a little shiftily.  “Didn’t know anything for sure.  Till now, I guess, the way the gardener jumped at it.”

“And you don’t think it’s just Cas; you think Naomi’s, what – reprogramming angels?  Making them her little soldiers, instead of God’s?”

“Well, if you think of an angel as just a few billion lines of primordial source code transformed by the Almighty’s holy compiler into executable—”  He wilts a bit under Ellen’s frown.  “Yeah, pretty much what you said just there.”

“Well,” says Jo.  “Well.”  She’s still glaring at the door as she rolls up her sleeves, rolls them back down again.  “So much for looking before you leap.  Angels don’t rescue themselves, do they?”  She doesn’t look at her mother as she opens the shed door and strolls through into the darkness on the other side.

Ellen swallows a shout (and a string of curses directed at that damn daughter of hers) as Ash glances her way, then hurries quickly after Jo – Bobby’s not far behind, either.  Ellen’s the last one to reach the door, and casts one last glance over her shoulder as she steps through.  Joshua is watching her – watching them – and he raises one hand in farewell as the darkness sweeps her away.


	6. Chapter 6

When Ellen opens her eyes again, she’s alone.

This wasn’t what Joshua had promised.  _There’s no help but what you take in with you_ , he’d said; but here there is no help, none at all.  Where’s her daughter?  Where are her friends?

But then she realizes where she is, and relaxes a bit, in spite of herself.  It’s the same field that’s she stood in so many times before, under a sunny sky; with the same little girl and woman dragging a kite behind them.  She wonders whether it’s her memory this time or Jo’s, and starts to walk toward herself and her daughter as that old pickup truck pulls up on the roadside.

It’s just a stray glance in the direction of the slamming car door that tells her something is wrong.  It’s not Bill who’s gotten out of the truck this time – it’s John Winchester.  Ellen misses a stride, and once she regains her footing, she picks up her pace so that she and John reach the other two at the same moment.  The younger Ellen listens, aghast, with Jo clutching her legs, as John recounts to them a twisted version of how Bill died: as a coward, a liar, a fool who’d jeopardized the mission and the lives of innocents.  As John finishes, he drops down on one knee in front of Jo and takes her tiny hands in his.  The memory of Ellen lets go of her daughter, pressing both of her hands against her mouth, as John says, “I’m sorry, sweetheart.  I’m so sorry.”  And he sweeps her up in one arm and slashes a knife across her throat with the other.

Ellen screams, but the shadow of herself just watches silently, meeting John’s eyes across Jo’s little body.  “Better to lose her now than she should have to live in a world like this,” he says with a hitch in his voice, and Ellen’s shade nods reluctantly.

Ellen is still screaming when a hand grabs her by the elbow and yanks her to her feet.  “Mom, move,” says an adult Jo, and by God, Ellen moves.  She can barely match the pace Jo sets, and her daughter ends up half-dragging her up the hill to John’s – to Bill’s – truck.  “Get in!” Jo shoves Ellen in front of her through the unlocked door into the cab, and clambers in behind her, making Ellen climb over the gear shift into the driver’s seat.  Jo slams the door behind her, and suddenly the truck is parked on a city street at night, in the space between two guttering streetlights.

“The hell was that?” Ellen asks, when she’s able.  “I just watched John Winchester—”  She can’t finish the thought, but luckily she doesn’t have to.

“I know.  I saw it too.”  Jo’s knees are bouncing anxiously against the glove compartment.  “Heaven’s little electric fence, I guess.  Our idea of paradise gone good and sour – abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”

Ellen glances sidelong at her daughter.  “Where were you?  I didn’t see you in the field at first.”

“Oh, Christ, Mom, I was—well, I was in the backseat of Dean Winchester’s car.  And he was there too.  Um.”  Jo’s face reddens and she waves one hand dismissively.  “Except it wasn’t him – or it was him, but he was also H. H. Holmes.  That serial killer in Philadelphia?  And the backseat of the Impala was really a coffin …”

“Oh, baby,” says Ellen, feeling her throat constrict all over again.  She grabs for Jo’s hand, squeezes it tightly.  Then a thought occurs to her.  “Did Dean Winchester ever get it in his idiot head to get busy with my daughter in the backseat of—”

“Mom!  No!” Jo groans, and snatches her hand away from her mother.

Ellen chooses to let this one slide.  A flicker of movement catches her eye – a figure banging on the door of the restaurant across the street and down a ways.  It takes her a moment to recognize the restaurant as the Roadhouse, transplanted somehow into this dingy cityscape.  The Roadhouse’s windows have all been boarded up, which was never true of the place while Ellen was alive; and there are Red Sox posters plastered over the vacant walls, which could certainly only happen over Ellen’s dead body.

It’s a much longer moment before she notices that the young man with the sensible haircut and the sweater vest banging on the Roadhouse door is, in fact, Ash.

Ellen can’t make out the words he’s shouting at the empty, unresponsive Roadhouse, but she doesn’t much need to.  She falls out of the truck as much as she jumps out, and Jo’s right behind her.  Ash doesn’t turn around when they approach, and Ellen slows down to take in his bleeding mouth, the ripped sleeve of his Oxford shirt, the shiner starting to rise around his left eye.  “Ash?” she says slowly.  “It’s me.  Ellen.  You okay?”

He stops banging on the door, backs away from it, glances her way.  “Don’t think Ellen’s here,” he says.  He drags the back of his hand across his mouth and smears blood halfway across his face.  His eyes are wild, darting; Ellen puts a hand on his shoulder but he jerks it nervously away.

“What happened to you, honey?” Ellen asks, but he resumes banging on the door, harder than ever now.

“Jesus, he’s going to hurt himself!”  Jo fumbles in her pocket and produces a set of keys.  “These work for the real one – they should work here, right?”

“You have keys to our bar in Heaven?” Ellen asks incredulously, and Jo shrugs her off.

“Always had them in my pocket when I was alive.  Feels good to have them here, too, you know?  Look out, Ash, lemme get at this door for a minute!”

Jo’s already got the key in the lock and is starting to turn the doorknob when something makes Ellen’s hand shoot out and stop her.  “Wait,” Ellen says.  “Something’s not – something’s just not quite right here.”

“Lemme in!” Ash howls, and shoves past her – between the two of them, the women grab him by the arms and hold him back from the door.  “Let go!”

“You sure you know what you’re doing, Mom?” Jo hollers, over the noise Ash is making.

“This is his nightmare, isn’t it?  Getting to the Roadhouse is too easy for Heaven’s electric fence; it’s what he wants.”  Ellen closes her eyes for a moment.  “I sure as hell didn’t want to get in your dad’s truck, Jo.  You didn’t see it after he – after the accident.  I had to sell it for scrap.  I never – I never wanted to see the inside of that truck again.  Going through that door …”

“When I got out of the coffin,” Jo says slowly, and grabs Ash’s arm again when he flails free.  “He was chasing me.  Dean, or Holmes.  Whatever.  I escaped through the door …”  She catches her mother’s eye.  “It was the door of Mrs. Erickson’s house.  Where you took me after – I guess it must have been after John Winchester called you.”

“It was,” says Ellen.  “It was.”

She hasn’t got anything else of value to add, so she looks around for something promising, anything at all.  It’s Jo who says first, “Mom?”  Ellen follows her daughter’s line of sight and there it is, at the end of the block – a grand old brick building with marble finishes, and the door just beside the main entrance, marked in fading script: _Faculty Entrance_.

“Let’s go.” 

She and Jo get underway with Ash in tow, but as soon as they move away from the Roadhouse’s façade, he starts fighting them.  One of his flailing arms catches Ellen on the jaw, making her curse.  “Ellen!” he howls, as he scratches at their hands.  “Ellen, help!”

“That’s what I’m trying to do, you damn idiot,” Ellen grunts.  “Jo, get the door!”

Jo keeps one hand locked in Ash’s shirtfront and levers the door open with the other.  “Here we go,” she says, and it’s as much a plea as a command.  “Here we go!”

It takes one final shove from Ellen, but she and Ash fall through the door – only Jo’s quick intervention keeps them from falling flat.  They straighten up when they’re able, and dust themselves off – Ash’s face is no longer bloodied, and he’s wearing his customary flannel instead of the pressed white button-down.  He doesn’t meet Ellen’s eyes when she asks, “You okay?”, and she purposefully avoids laying a hand on his shoulder.

“’Course.”  He looks around, shrugs nonchalantly.  “Where the hell we end up, anyway?”

“Bobby’s house.”  They both turn and look at Jo.  She’s standing over a desk piled high with dusty old books and empty beer bottles.  “We’re in Bobby’s house.”

“’Course you are.”  Ellen starts as Bobby’s disembodied voice floats to her from the next room.  In spite of herself, she reaches for one of the empty bottles at hand, and Jo gapes at the gesture.  “Glad you could make it for dinner, everyone.  Wouldn’t have liked it much if you’d been late.”


	7. Chapter 7

The house is full of kitchen smells: baked bread, garlic, a tangle of other arcane spices. There’s light from the door into the other room; cautiously, Ellen steps forward, waving Jo and Ash behind her. She still holds the beer bottle tightly in one hand, prompting Jo to ask, under her breath, “… Mom?”

A last chopping motion of Ellen’s hand silences her, and Ellen steps into the next room, the kitchen. A table and chairs has been shoved into the cramped space, and Bobby stands proudly over his dinner guests with a tray in his hands. Ellen has a sudden, dizzying sense of déjà vu: she’s been at this dinner party before. She and Bill, and John Winchester too, celebrating a hunt gone well. Back before it all went wrong. She stares at her own lifeless face across the kitchen: her body has been propped up in a chair at the table, one hand resting limply on the table with a fork perched between her fingers. Bill isn’t here, though John is, equally as dead as this second Ellen: John, and Jo, and Rufus too. Only Bobby is still alive in this grim scene, and he lays his silver tray down on the table and lifts the lid.

A head rolls out: that of a blonde woman. She would have been pretty, in life, and Ellen recognizes her even though she’s never met the woman. Bobby’s wife. Bobby stands back, tucks the tray lid under his arm, and gestures grandly. “Dig in, everyone!”

Ellen’s stomach turns over. She hefts the beer bottle in her hand, shoves back Jo when she tries to grab her arm. The bottle arcs through the air and shatters on the kitchen floor by Bobby’s feet. He looks up, and his expression folds in on itself, from benevolent host to cold rage in a moment’s space. He turns, and picks up a steak knife from beside Rufus’s hand. Rufus doesn’t seem to mind.

“How dare you,” Ellen spits. Jo is pulling on her arm now, but she resists. “Villain of your own nightmare? You going to just sit here and wallow in your own guilt while the rest of us – while the rest of us …”

Her words fail her. She decides to let her hand do the talking instead. She shakes Jo loose and takes two long strides across the room to backhand Bobby.

“Mom!”

Bobby spits blood. He looks at Ellen’s face, and then her feet. The knife falls from his hand and clatters on the floor. “I’m not …” he begins, and changes tack. “It wasn’t supposed to …”

She cuts him off with one raised hand. “Let’s go. Let’s just go.”

“Go where?” Bobby asks, and this time Ellen hasn’t got an answer for him. Fortunately, Ash is on hand to provide one.

“Over here.”

Ellen and Jo return to the living room, leaving Bobby trailing after them. Ash is standing in front of the door to the basement, which is no proper basement door at all. At least Ellen can’t say she’s ever seen a basement door carved of marble, inlaid with gold and all manner of precious stones. The carved inscription is in Latin: _Aut viam inveniam aut faciam_. Ellen glances at Ash’s face; he only shrugs.

“Where does it go?” Jo says, voicing aloud what they can only make sly gestures about.

“Only one way to find out.” Bobby’s voice is rough, but loud enough to carry. Another round of glances is exchanged, and then a round of curt, jerky nods. Jo finds Ellen’s hand for a moment and clutches it long enough to give her fingers a squeeze. Then Bobby moves past them, reaches out, and pushes with both hands.

The door swings open and reveals a long hallway.

Where the door was ornate, this hallway is sleek and modern. While there is no apparent light source, the corridor is bright, and Ellen feels as if the hum of fluorescent lighting is just below the level of her hearing. They stand in the doorway for a moment, looking, listening.

And then the screaming starts.

It’s somewhere around the bend in the corridor, and it’s intermittent – broken up by low chanting. “That’s Enochian,” Ash says, but shakes his head helplessly. “Can’t make it out.”

“Is that – is that Castiel?” Jo asks, and Ellen isn’t sure, the voice is so ragged and so far away. But then Jo points to a tiny figure, far down the hall, slumped on a bench against the wall; and yes, that is Castiel, Ellen would swear it up and down. God bless Jo’s young eyes.

“Cas,” says Bobby, then repeats himself in a shout. “Cas!” He takes off at a dead run as Ellen hisses, “Keep your voice down, you old idiot!”

What else can she do? She takes off after him, and Jo and Ash beside her. She’s not used to running, even as a ghost – her legs are pumping, but she doesn’t seem to be getting much – any? – closer to her target. Castiel remains a small, beige splotch at the limit of Ellen’s vision. She stops running, even as the others remain fixed, running in place, just ahead of her and moving no farther. “What the hell?” she mutters, even as fear is prickling the back of her neck.

“No.” Ellen spins. There’s a woman standing behind her, dressed in a tidy pantsuit and her hair done up in a tidy bun. She’s Heaven’s version of Sarah Palin by all appearances, minus the glasses and the accent. “I think you have all seen too much for Hell to be a very apt place for you at all.”


	8. Chapter 8

“Ellen!” Bobby is the first to notice something is wrong. He turns back and puts himself between Ellen and the newcomer. “Who are you?” he demands, as she strides forward. “What’d you do to Cas? What do you want?”

She smiles. It is not a friendly expression, and Ellen grabs Bobby’s arm to pull him back – he just shakes her off. “Not to waste my time talking to the likes of you,” the stranger says, and she reaches out and touches Bobby on the forehead. “Good night and good luck.”

And Bobby is gone.

Ellen chokes, and stumbles back, but the woman’s head swivels toward her like a compass point. “Good night, Ellen,” she says, and reaches out, but her hand falters as the hall flickers around them. The walls seem to stretch, and then snap back into place – Ellen realizes she hears that chanting again – Enochian, she’d bet her life on it – but not so far away this time. The stranger’s face is twisted in pain as she looks around and finds Ash, chanting away. “You think these child’s tricks will work on me?” she says, and the polite façade is falling away now, the condescending sneer replaced by a grimace. “You’re nipping at the ankles of giants, boy.”

“The bigger they come, the harder they fall.” Jo’s fist catches the stranger on the chin. She staggers back even as Jo shakes her bleeding knuckles and spatters the stark white floor with red. “Well. You’re not so big.”

She and Ash advance on the shouting stranger and Ellen casts around for what to do next. And here, quite unexpectedly, is Castiel– no longer at the opposite end of a limitless hallway, but sitting against the wall just beside her, next to a plain white door. He has an angel sword across his lap, both hands resting lightly on it. Ellen spares a moment to be grateful for whatever Ash is doing with these Enochian spells before crashing to her knees at Castiel’s side. “Cas! Castiel, I need you to snap out of it. I don’t know what she’s done to you, but we need you in this to win, Cas. We’ll get you out of here, but we gotta have a little help, okay?”

He turns his head and stares at her – through her. His gaze is an empty echo from a thousand miles away, and she feels her hopes begin to founder. They’ve come too far to find – this. There’s a crash from behind her, and a scream. A woman’s scream. No – a girl’s. She doesn’t look. “Castiel,” she says. She feels tears pricking behind her eyes, but she takes his big calloused hand between her two smaller ones and holds it tightly. He doesn’t resist her. “Do you remember me?”

“Ellen,” he says, as though he’s not quite sure. “We drank together once.” 

His eyes focus, and find her face. “Please,” she says urgently, and the word hangs in the air, unattached to any particular plea or demand. “Please.”

“Ellen.” His expression unfolds quite suddenly into profound concern. He leans forward and squeezes her hands in his. “You really shouldn’t be here,” he says apologetically, and Ellen feels a hand close around the back of her neck.

“That will be quite enough of that,” a woman says, and Ellen’s world implodes in gravity and light.

###

Ellen blinks.

The sun is bright. Too bright. She puts a hand over her face, and squints. That’s odd. She shouldn’t have a hand. Or a face. She’s only just died (again). Is there a life after the afterlife? God, she hates metaphysics. Her eyes start to adjust to the light, and she looks around.

She’s in the Garden.

“So,” says Joshua. Bobby and Ash and – Ellen’s heart jumps into her throat – Jo are arrayed behind him, looking equally as stunned as Ellen feels. “Naomi found you.”

“That her name?” Ellen coughs. She really does feel like she’s died all over again, a fresh corpse to fertilize the Garden’s soil. “Yeah. Thought she was going to take us apart.”

“She did.” Joshua moves away from her. He’s wielding a pair of pruning shears, and takes aim at an overgrown forsythia. “I just swept up the pieces after. You find Castiel?”

“Sounds an awful lot like helping.”

“Nah. Sweeping up’s just a natural part of gardening. Can’t leave all the flotsam just floating around, it spoils the landscape.” Joshua smiles into the forsythia as the stray branches fall this way and that. “You find Castiel?”

“Yeah …” Ellen crosses the clearing to Jo, brushes the hair away from her daughter’s eyes. Jo gives her a troubled but steady smile, and Ellen smiles back in spite of herself. At least they made it out. At least Jo’s all right. “Not that it did a lot of good. Hardly got to say a word. Didn’t get to say a single one that made any kind of difference.”

“Hard to say that from here, don’t you think? A friendly word, a hand to hold … those might be just a feather on the scale, but we put a lot of stock in feathers up here.” Joshua pauses to gauge his work on the forsythia. “The smallest things seem to matter the most, when the world is balanced on a dagger’s edge.”

“Do you think so?” Jo murmurs, and Ellen’s not sure if she’s asking Ellen, or Joshua.

“I just …” Bobby stammers, and looks up at the blue sky. “I just don’t want to see those boys suffer any more than they already have.”

Ellen catches a glimpse of Joshua’s face as he bends to scoop up the fallen branches. “There’s always suffering, though, isn’t there?” he asks. “Often enough it’s only suffering that can put things to right once they’ve gone astray.”

“Then what is the point?” A bubble of hysteria bursts in Ellen’s chest and she laughs out loud. “Then what is the goddamn point of all this?”

Joshua looks at her, and Jo, and Bobby and Ash. “To live,” he says simply.

“But we’re dead, you asshole,” she says, and Joshua just looks at her with a sad smile on his face. A thought strikes her, apropos of nothing, and she blurts out: “What happens to angels when they die?”

He reaches out and touches her over her heart. There’s a flare of light and before Ellen can even utter the curse word that’s forming in her mouth, she and her daughter and their friends are standing back in the middle of the Roadhouse.

“Well,” says Bobby. “Well.” He wipes his eyes, and doesn’t meet Ellen’s. “Who’s up for a game of pool?”

He and Ash settle in for a game. Jo wanders around for a bit, puttering aimlessly with this and that, before settling back into a booth by the window with a paperback novel. Ellen turns on the radio, takes all the glasses down, and starts washing them one by one.

They work and play in subdued silence for a few moments or maybe an eternity. It’s only the sound of the door closing quietly that makes them look up from their private concerns.

“Hey baby,” says Bill. He’s young – so young – but his face creases into that familiar well-worn smile he’s always saved for his wife and his baby daughter. Ellen drops the glass she’s holding – it hits the floor and shatters into a million perfect pieces and for the rest of eternity she will always be perfectly, beautifully one glass short. “It’s good to be home.”


End file.
